Pickle Me This on Thought You Were Dead

Over at PMT, Kerry Clare writes about discovering Terry Griggs, and her thoughts on both Thought You Were Dead and Quickening. Read the whole thing here. Here, though, is a taste:

Griggs' fiction is as demanding as it is rewarding, pulling no punches at all. The reader is plunged rather than eased into the story, whose language must be untangled, unraveled in order to work out the plot. Chellis Beith may be a slacker, but Terry Griggs is no such thing, her tangling and raveling deliberate and intricate, sending up crime fiction, small-town culture, and the literary life. And so much more, this becoming clear with every rereading, with every sentence picked apart, with every one closely read. What a richly textured lark is this, how substantial is Terry Grigg's concept of whimsy.

In other Griggs related news, The Globe Paperback reviewer reviews in Twitter-like fashion Quickening:

QUICKENING

By Terry Griggs, Biblioasis, 156 pages, $19.95

Griggs's collection of short stories was nominated for a Governor-General's Award when it was published nearly 20 years ago, and they still display her talent and quirky sense of humour.

(Griggs writes the Tuesday Essay this week at globeandmail.com/books.)